Last week, I spoke to a group of students at London Business School about what makes Israel a unique startup ecosystem and our approach to venture at Remagine Ventures.
The students had some great questions about venture capital, Israel and entrepreneurship, but one struck me in particular. It went something like this: I want to be an entrepreneur and start a company. Should I take a job after business school or become a founder? What should I do between school and founding a startup? If taking a job, what job would have the most impact?
Needless to say, it’s a very personal question and there’s no right answer. The answer depends on who you are, what you do and what you want to be doing in the next foreseeable future. But when I thought about it in abstract (removing the need to think about paying student loans, work visas, etc), I thought it was important to keep in mind the role of a startup CEO to answer this question.
The role of the CEO in a startup involves setting the company’s vision, hiring and motivating people and raising money.
Everything you did up to the point of starting a company will play a role in the culture you set, and your ability to deliver on the above description. For some, like Mark Zuckerberg, dropping out of Harvard and starting to code was enough. But Mark is a massive outlier, there are many college dropouts out there that comply with the more traditional statistics about startup success (or failure) rate.
And I’m not just talking about someone’s professional background or what they’ve studied. The early team (and in particular the founder) will shape the company and the culture it sets. And this very diversity is a wonderful thing – otherwise, all companies would look the same and follow a formula.
Ben Horowitz, founding partner of A16Z just published a new book about how to create your business culture, titled “What you do is who you are“. In the intro it says: “The times and circumstances people were raised often shape them – yet only a few leaders have managed to shape their times…. Who you are is not the values you list on the wall…. who you are is what you do”.
The answer to the question sounds like a simple binary choice:
- Start a startup.
- Get a job
But the reality is wonderfully more complicated: you can do an internship. It can be with a corporate or a startup. You can take a job for a couple of years and learn a lot on someone else’s dime. You can bootstrap a startup during college or decide that you need more time to mature. There’s no right or wrong answer and you have to listen to your own gut. Keep asking the hard questions, and keep experimenting. You’ll end up where you’re supposed to. Best of luck!
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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